


Ithaca

by Milotzi



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fecundity, Light BDSM, Menses, Redemption, Revenge, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:27:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22364083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milotzi/pseuds/Milotzi
Summary: Spellwood separated, then not. Hilda learns to accept if not to approve.This is unapologetically AU, first non-fluff but then so very, very fluff, a bit of melodrama maybe and entirely unlikely. And fairly explicit in places. For my fellow Spellwood shippers. Who hopefully find this one-shot appropriate.
Relationships: Faustus Blackwood/Zelda Spellman
Comments: 12
Kudos: 59





	Ithaca

**Author's Note:**

> I did steal a location from a spoiler and a few elements of the trailer for part 3.
> 
> The ending is even more unlikely than the rest, but there you go. Sometimes we deserve what is unlikely.
> 
> Apologies to anybody who knows anything at all about druidism and Celtic mythology. I just played around with things.
> 
> Warnings in tags

Even though he has found a new pack of warlocks and witches to dominate and rule, pleasure eludes him.

In his feverish dreams he kicks in the door with force, storms through the debris, and takes back all that was his in one short but glorious battle.

He can even see her, kneeling in front of him, her priestly robes torn and bloody from the fight, her face and arms raised up to him in supplication not to harm her family, who are kneeling behind her. Like an Unholy Madonna she is weeping tears of blood that trickle down her face, and soak her blouse, pink nipples shining through the thin white fabric.

"Faustus," she whispers in that hoarse voice of hers.

His dreams continue in two directions, one of slow triumphant unrelenting and bloody revenge and another of triumph and sweet conquest of a more than willing witch. And yet, just before he reaches satisfaction, he wakes up.

It is the middle of the night.

His bedsheets are drenched and stink of stale sweat, the humid air around him feels heavy, and the witch next to him feels wrong and smells wrong. 

"Mi emperador, mi tesoro," she whispers, snuggling up to him but her voice is wrong, too.

He pushes her away, turns round, and keeps his eyes shut firmly, pretending to be asleep until he is.

This time, when he kicks in the door, he finds his unfaithful whore of a wife smoking and lounging half-dressed on his unholy robes, right there in front of the Spellman fire place where he first gave in to her allure. Instead of her family she is surrounded and being serviced by demonic suitors, one of whom has his monstrous head between her spread legs, while another is sucking her left breast. Although yet another demon is taking her from behind, the Queen of Hell is focused on licking the tips of the fingers of the hand the High Priestess has graciously allowed her to hold. It is a veritable orgy.

His own feet are stuck to the threshold. 

She looks up and blows smoke in his direction.

"You did not think, I would wait for you, did you?" She cackles, and all who surround her join in until the sound of their laughter becomes a black sea that drowns him.

In the morning he throws the whore whose hair is the wrong kind of blond out of his bed, his apartment, and his life, as he has so many witches before her.

They were well paid. They have nothing to complain about.

At the bottom of the staircase, the witch turns round and gives him the finger, in a gesture of defiance, and, by letting it sink slowly towards her, she mocks his impotence.

His curse does not quite reach her, and the door slams behind her before a part of the stucco ceiling comes down.

Damn this heat. Damn this life on the run. Damn the Spellman bitches who brought him low like this. 

Even a lick of the cat o' nine tails brings no relief.

Damn her.

***

Years have gone by, and, secretly, she has sometimes wondered whether she will ever see him again.

She has never told anyone, although she sometimes senses that maybe Hilda knows and despises her for it.

She does not wait for him, but none of the warlocks, witches and demons she allows into her bed are more than a distraction. She does not expect them to be more but she would not mind finding someone more permanent. It does not happen.

When the mood strikes her and noone around her seems beddable it is his face, his hungry kisses and his prick, fingers and tongue that she thinks of as she slowly strokes herself to a climax. "Zelda," she whispers to herself, wishing it was his voice, his fingers, his tongue, his prick.

The wars happen, and the floods come and go, as does the big fire, and she begins to wonder whether or not he is alive or dead.

Then the news comes about someone sighting him in that place that was badly damaged in the wars, with a new coven, trying to flee that place, too. Then someone mentions that they have heard he died; that year, a witch from down south joins the coven, and confirms the rumours.

So he is dead.

More years go by, and she thinks of him less and less when she takes decisions that her unholy office demand, or reads in the unholy tomes he has left behind. She does not stop to remember him when she picks up his second best ceremonial knife, the one he left behind, and pricks a new acolyte's finger during the ceremony of the dark baptism.

She wears white collars and embroidered robes unironically now, symbols of her status, and feels less of an impostor than she used to. She hardly remembers how thrilled and yet afraid she was when she first put on his second-best robes for the first unholy masses she held.

She is, however, still regularly visited by vivid nightmares of revenge, of how she will see him bent over the dead body of Ambrose, Sabrina or even Hilda, and how, as he looks up with bloodied eyes, and croaks her name, she will plunge that knife right into where his heart should be only to discover that he has none, that in his chest there is a black empty hole, which, when her knife goes right through it, starts filling with a pool of blood, blood which splashes all over her when she withdraws her knife and Faustus explodes into thousands and thousands of tiny shards of glass. 

When she wakes up, she finds that, more often than not, she will have her period.

Then those, too, are a matter of the past.

Witches age slowly but they do.

Witches age but their looks can deceive.

Sometimes, when she checks her hair or her make-up in the mirror, she wonders what he would look like now. Sometimes she thinks she can hardly remember what he looked like then.

There is so much more to life than marriage. 

***

There are wars, and floods, and fires.

Somehow he lives even though most of those he has lived with since Greendale do not.

Somehow he ends up on the other side of the world, where there is no heat, and life is slow and steady, following the rhythm of nature.

There are witches and warlocks, although they do not go by that name. They follow the cycle of the year. They are easy prey to his manipulations.

But after a while he is lulled into being fine with being the first among equals rather than the supreme leader.

The place is peaceful. The sun rises every morning, day after day, and the moon waxes and wanes, month after month, and the seasons come and go, year after year.

He has stopped dreaming of revenge but she still haunts his dreams occasionally.

Being a king and a druid is so much more and so much less than being a high priest. It suits him, he finds. 

Sexual mores are loose. That suits him, too.

Then the heat and the droughts start, and he is chosen as the sacrifce needed to right what is wrong.

"When the land needs it, the king dies," his second-in-comand says.

Once more, he packs his meagre belongings, and flees.

***

The year is a hot one, and none of the usual vegetables and herbs in their garden are flourishing, despite their growth spells, despite the Cain soil, and despite their efforts to keep them watered. Indeed, even Cain's pit looks more like a sand pit than the rich dark soil it used to. 

The Sweetwater carries hardly any water; Greendale's dales are green no longer. 

She and the coven have done what they could, to no avail. They may need outside help, she decides, as she lights another cigarette.

The London Times of 1897 contains an advertisement for _Fertility and other Irrigation Magic and Witchcraft brought to your home and your homestead by Genuine Druids from the Emerald Isles, no commission too small_. There is an address. She will write a letter. If they are any good, they will still be around.

***

He lives in a one-bedroom flat in the basement of a museum dedicated to the late Alasdair Crowley. The flat comes with the job of caretaker. They have mentioned retirement to him, once or twice. 

The building used to house a number of magical and otherworldly enterprises. In his spare time he has started sifting through the contents of boxes kept in the attic, and has come across some papers and items from the Late Victorian Druidical Shop he vaguely remembers from past visits to the city. He briefly considers whether he should set up a druidic circle here in London, and then remembers the bore Madam Blavatsky's occult meetings were.

In another box locked with a Pandorra spell that it takes him a few nights to open he finds some occult jewelry, obviously hidden, obviously from some heist or robbery, mostly plain rings with engraved demonic symbols, which he returns to the box. There is, however, one brooch, of a quince around whose branches a snake is wrapped, that he pockets. 

That night he dreams of fucking her first in what seems to be the Greendale Forest, then somewhere in the Spellmans' garden, as snakes are coiling around their limbs. With every movement, they are sinking deeper and deeper into the moist and fertile soil of what must be part of the Cain pit.

In the early morning hours he briefly wakes up, in a moist puddle. He begins to wipe himself clean, then closes his eyes and thinks about how smooth her skin felt, and how wet and inviting her pussy. She will need to be punished, by hand, and then she will have to punish him, by whip. As he imagines the lashes coming, faster, and faster, his hand, which is stroking his prick by now, is moving faster, too. Faster, and faster, until he finds release. 

When her letter arrives the next day, it feels like a knife through his stomach.

His fingers gently stroke the neat handwriting that crawls across the page like a spell although all it conveys is a business proposition.

Later, he types his response on the Remington in the museum's office. He is a druid after all, after a fashion, and although there surely is no place in Greendale for a former High Priest, a druid seems to be what is needed there. 

It is time to go home.

***

She opens the padded envelope that has come all the way from London. A short letter of acceptance sets out the day and the approximate time of the arrival of the Druid Company's representative. They have sent some spells and preperatory ceremonies the coven can do in preparation of the company representative's visit. There is also a small box. When she opens it, she finds a brooch, a lucky charm or unholy symbol, to be worn by the lady of the house or High Priestess of the local church. When she takes it from the box, she pricks her finger on its pin, and a drop of blood stains the white blouse she is wearing. As she sucks her finger she wonders whether this is a portent of some kind. It is, as she finds when she wakes up the next morning.

Witches age, but unlike mortals, they do not necessarily only age in one direction. 

***

He does not need to kick in the door. It swings open as soon as he touches it with the tip of his shoe.

The hallway is empty, and, cautiously, he takes a few steps into the quiet room. 

He holds on to his stick and his suitcase, ready to turn around and run or to stay and to defend himelf, whichever should become necessary. He has tried to think this through but has not managed to think beyond the threshold. He wonders whether he will even recognise her. Or she him. And what will happen next.

A part of him is whispering of violence and revenge. Another part of him just wants to hear her voice again, after all these years.

No sound emerges from the interior.

He is slowly making his way further into the house, and has nearly reached the parlour, when the door from the kitchen opens. He stops abruptly.

She looks exactly like she did that day when she asked for spiritual guidance, except for the teapot she is holding.

All he can do is stare at her, while his brain slowly takes in that it is the good china teapot he used to keep in his office for his personal use, and slowly let go of his suitcase.

She is staring right back at him, for what seems an eternity.

"Faustus," she whispers, "you are alive." And she lets go of the teapot, and throws herself at him.

***

In her nightmares she always had a knife that she would plunge into his chest.

In those nightmares he would stand over the body of someone he had just murdered, and the impetus to kill him was strong.

The impetus that propels her towards him, once she has dropped the teapot, is at first entirely unclear, and then, seconds later, clear but entirely surprising to herself. 

***

In his nightmares, he came for revenge, and more often than not, it was his stick he used to beat her to a pulp. Or get her to surrender.

"Revenge," a voice whispers inside his head, "revenge is sweet."

But he does not move his stick, not even to protect himself, as the teapot crashes on the floor, and she ends up mere inches away from him.

He does not even move when she throws her arms around him and holds him in a tight embrace.

"You're alive," she whispers, and her body presses against his, her arms hold him tight, and her lips find his.

He hears a sound like that of a wounded animal, a loud groan, that he knows is coming from him, and then he lets go of his stick, puts his arms around her, too, and starts kissing her right back, first cautiously, then more and more passionately.

Only when his tongue tastes salt, he realizes that they are both crying.

***

When Hilda later comes in from the garden, she nearly steps into china shards and the puddle of tea in the hall. She sees a suitcase, and a stick lying across the floor, and cautiously follows the trail of clothing items up the staircase to Zelda's bedroom door. She listens cautiously, then gently opens the door. 

The trail of clothing continues, and ends by the bed, on which her sister lies, asleep, in glorious nudity, her limbs entangled with those of someone who is naked, obviously male and also asleep.

She tiptoes out of the room again, closing the door quiety behind her. With a tinge of jealousy she wonders why it is always her sister any handymen they call in fall for. This one must be a special one, if her sister, who likes to tease and lure but does not always choose to actually have sex when she could these days, ended up in bed with him so quickly, obviously minutes after he arrived.

It is only much later that she realizes who the druid is, and by then it is too late to do anything about it.

She puts her foot down at having him live in the Spellman home, and somewhat surprisingly neither Zelda nor Faustus make a fuss.

He moves into a small house in the garden, without further ado. It becomes locally known as _The Hermitage_ , and whatever powers he learnt as a druid work. Greendale becomes a green dale once more, the river carries water, and the vegetable and fruit patch of their garden flourishes and prospers once more.

Nobody seems to mind that the former High Priest has returned to their High Priestess's bed and hearth, or she to his, or whatever arrangement they have.

Those few people who choose to comment on this agree that, true, Faustus was a wild young warlock, of course, but look at how well he has turned out now that he has returned from his travels.

Hilda herself does not mind after a while. Zelda is a grown witch and seems to know what makes her happy.

And of course, little Faustina Hildegard, born 13 months exactly after her father's return to Greendale, has helped to reconcile her aunt to the idea that maybe even a Faustus Blackwood can be redeemed.

**Author's Note:**

> A note on the title: _Ithaca_ is a Greek island thought to be the home Homer's Odysseus returns to eventually, to reunite with his faithful wife, Penelope, and to resume his rule.


End file.
